"Never!"
"Have you heard it from any one else?"
"From no one who had a right to know it."
"Come, then, sit down by me," gasped the Princess, convulsively clutching Pushkin's arm, and drawing him on to the divan beside her. "Listen to me! I will make a confession to you. What I have hitherto told to none but the Patriarch I will confess to you." Sobs choked her voice; then violently tearing the lace handkerchief with which she had dried her tears, she continued, "Even to my husband I have never dared to say what I now tell to you: I am Sophie Narishkin's mother!"
Pushkin, of course, appeared to be intensely surprised at this discovery.
"You be my judge," continued the Princess, as she threw back the gossamer covering from her shoulders. She drew a long breath. "I was but a child, scarce sixteen; my parents dead. I met a man whom all conspired to worship. The aunt who brought me up was a vain, ambitious woman, and had made me equally so. Every one about me counselled me to return his love, telling me that he was unhappy for cause of me. They sought out old records of how Czars who had not loved their wives had sent them into convents, and had raised others, more beloved, to share the imperial throne. Flattery, ambition, inexperience, youthful fancy, turned my head, and I—fell. Ah, how low I fell! So low that my whole life since has been one expiation! Still, I never relinquished hope; I ever believed that the man who had wronged me would come one day to raise me from shame to splendor. I implored him; I knelt in the dust at his feet. Then he published the ukase that only the daughters of reigning families might be raised to the throne of Russia—that was the answer to my dreams! In the depths of my despair a man in my own rank of life came and asked my hand. True, he had no love to give me, but he gave me his name; I, too, had no love to give him, but I have borne his name honorably and spotlessly before the world. And now there suddenly breaks upon me the dreaded catastrophe which for sixteen long years has been my nightly terror: Sophie Narishkin will marry, and people will be asking, 'But who is this Sophie Narishkin? Who is her father—who is her mother?"
"You may make yourself at ease on that score, Princess. The wedding will be conducted in all privacy by the Patriarch of Solowetshk in the Chapel of Peter the Great on Petrovsky Island. After the wedding not a soul will see the young couple in St. Petersburg, or speak about them."
This consolation was poison to the heart of the Princess. Would she see Pushkin no more, then?
"But why this feverish haste? The girl is but a child, scarce sixteen years old!"
"Princess," returned Pushkin, mournfully, "we do not reckon time by years, but by the griefs we endure; and by that computation Sophie has already lived a long life. Sixteen years of confinement, banishment, unrecognized by any one—sixteen years without knowing a loving word or ray of brightness should count for age enough! It is just this dream of happiness that is keeping the poor child in life. Sophie is a somnambulist on this earth. To awaken would be to kill her!"